Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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But the sense of well-being was short-lived. As we emerged from the barbershop into the crowded and noisy street, a kind of cloud descended around me, a sense of vulnerability, and I was reminded with considerable force that I was at that moment sixty-three years gone, an old man, without language, in the backstreets of a Muslim city, stoned on an illegal drug, as defenseless as a baby—beyond which, of course, I was facing a challenge in the weeks to come that would either kill me ingloriously or fortify me for life’s home stretch.

At the meat place, we ingested skewer after skewer of chicken and pepper sausage and steak. And floated home. To the whorehouse. Where that night I had a staggering dream, a kind of fin du monde, in which a bloody and beheaded man appeared at the door of the apartment asking for me, attempting to push his way in, determined that he should find me. As Nigel and the others forced him from the room, he hollered over their shoulders that he knew I was in there, knew my name, knew everything about me, said he would track me down, would not rest until he had found me. And then he was gone, and in the hallucinogenic logic of the dream world, I was left pondering who he was, whether he would be able to pursue me with no head, and perhaps most significantly in this twisted Jungian conundrum, why he had been wearing my shoes.